I have to say I am more surprised by the reaction to the transition, then to the transition announcement itself.
The "jump ship" folks have got to get a grip. First, did you even watch the keynote? Based on some of the comments, I highly doubt it.
What on earth is such a big deal?
If Steve Jobs had simply said, "We plan on getting faster CPUs that consume less power, and it will take two years to make it happen." we'd all be jumping up and down in excitement. But, for some reason I cannot grasp, the fact that it'll be an Intel chip is reason for panic.
What do you think is going to happen, suddenly OS X will crash constantly? Or that your friends will say, I told you so? Or that OS X will be a somehow different experience? In case you didn't notice, Steve was running his whole presentations on Intel and you didn't even notice, did you ("you" collectively)? Just like you won't even notice when you get one, unless you switch for some insane reason. Won't that be ironic, people switching to Wintel to avoid Intel.
Here's the deal. We're all going to get a faster lineup of machines and we'll get them in all variants, including laptops. They're still going to run OS X and they're going to run it every bit as well os PPC. Get a freaking grip! Unbelievable.
As for obsolescence, I have no idea what sense that argument even makes. If your apps still work, how is that obsolete? And to keep up with progress, either hardware or software, you are always in a philosophical "obsolescence mode" regardless of which CPU you are using, so the argument is utterly meaningless.
Also, I'm continually entertained by those of us (sometimes myself) who act as though we have a freaking clue as to how to run a massive high tech company successfully. If you think you can beat Stevo and Apple, go for it.
I personally found it utterly brilliant that they actually were running the secret dual life OS X on Intel for the "Just in Case" scenario. That's just smart. Look, Apple gave it a go with PPC and took it as far as they could. They wisely had a backup plan and it is seemingly going to be a better option in the long run. They have to go with it. Or would you rather have another CPU gap the size of the grand canyon? Imagine this, one day OS X and Windows will have zero performance gap (at least in terms of raw CPU, what the OS does after that to slow things down, who knows).
And kudos to all those who said this was going on the whole time. You were right. 100% right. I find this to be a very exciting day.